How Facebook’s 4 New Tools Will Help You Optimize Your Posts

Lately, all of the news about Facebook has been about how they are squeezing publishers by making them “pay to play”. Unless publishers are paying to boost their reach, they can only reach about 16% of their audience. This even applies to people who liked your page in order to see your posts: Facebook even hides posts from people who consistently engage with the page.

However, Facebook has finally given publishers some more positive news. Although you still won’t be able to reach your whole fan base without paying, you will now be able to target posts and publish them more effectively.

1. Interest Targeting

Now when you post to your page, you can click “targeting” and choose to show your post to people with a certain interest.

What This Means For You

This new tool won’t automatically make your posts reach more interested people, but if you do your audience insights homework, you will find clever ways to boost your engagement (and reach).

For example, if you dig into your insights and notice that a big segment of your audience likes Game of Thrones, and another segment likes the Walking Dead, you can publish a different post targeted to each group. Even if Facebook only shows these posts to a small number of fans, these targeted posts will be more likely to get more engagement (and reach more people)!

2. Post End Date

Have you ever posted a promotion or news, only for it to pick up momentum once it’s already out of date? With Facebook’s new “post end date” option, you can make sure a post only goes on people’s news feeds for a limited amount of time.

What This Means For You

This helps you keep your posts relevant and timely. No longer will your customer come to your website only to realize that they’re too late for a promotion, or that you’ve given them outdated information.

3. Smart Publishing

This feature is only for large media organizations for now, but essentially it automates and optimizes your posts for you. If Facebook notices that a certain article on your site is popular, it will automatically show this article as a post in your audience’s news feeds. We hope that this feature will make it to more and more publishers in the future.

What This Means For You

Unless you are the New York Times, this feature won’t be available to you yet. When it rolls out to more publishers, your popular content will have a much higher chance of going viral (without you even lifting a finger).

4. Audience Insights Improvements

There is a new “Top URLs” section in Facebook’s domain insights. It shows you when influential pages and people shared your posts. Facebook has made this feature very intuitive and easy to use, giving users the ability to look at hourly insights data, and clearer data from social plugins.

What This Means For You

The biggest thing these insights improvements will do is help us understand exactly how much influencers and other pages boost your reach. Some pages will find that they have a few evangelists that are helping their content reach more people. Now it will be easier than ever to notice your “super fans” and build relationships with them.

We hope you try out some of these new tools and tell us what you think in the comments below. Does Facebook’s new offering to publishers make it a better channel for sharing content? Let us know in the comments below. And if you need help setting up and managing your company’s social media marketing, make sure to book a free 30 minute consultation with us.